From the brilliant Rawi Hage, one of our most acclaimed, award-winning writers, comes an uncompromising, intricate puzzlebox of a novel about a man who literally embodies our world’s most conflicted identities: an atheist from a Christian Arab family in Beirut who immigrates with a Jewish woman to Montreal, where he is often mistaken for Muslim.
Sanctity opens in the voice of Rashid El Hajj, a middle-aged writer who was born in Beirut into a conservative Christian Arab family. As a young man, Rashid met and fell in love with a Lebanese Jew, Nathalie, and the couple immigrated to Montreal. Here, Rashid soon neglected to take financial responsibility for Nathalie or for Pythia, their daughter. Nathalie, out of desperation, took custody of Pythia and left to live with relatives in the Jewish community, freeing Rashid to became a professor of literature and ultimately a successful writer.
As we meet Rashid, he is attending a bookfair in the United Arab Emirates, where he encounters a prince who wishes to engage Rashid in an intellectual correspondence. The prince becomes a patron of the author, paying Rashid handsomely. Reluctantly (but not entirely), Rashid accepts these generous gifts, which serve to fuel his growing drug and gambling habits.
At the heart of this rich novel is the evolving relationship between Rashid and his now-grown daughter, who seeks answers about her heritage from her father. Rashid considers himself a free thinker with profoundly intellectual leftist affiliations. He proudly lives a contradictory and contrarian political and philosophical existence. But in middle-age, fuelled by increasingly out-of-control addictions, his life of constant adjustment, non-belonging, and non-conformity leads to a personal identity crisis. This prompts Rashid, out of love and fear, to seek to simplify his daughter’s life: ‘Let her be a full Jew, rather than a fraction of everything,’ he declares. This backfires spectacularly, and Pythia becomes only more curious about Rashid’s past and her own history. The relationship between an atheist father unable to live up to his obligations and a daughter searching for truth becomes the beating heart of this stunning, complex novel about the delicate, threatened, and often dangerous zone between identities.
Genre: Literary Fiction
Sanctity opens in the voice of Rashid El Hajj, a middle-aged writer who was born in Beirut into a conservative Christian Arab family. As a young man, Rashid met and fell in love with a Lebanese Jew, Nathalie, and the couple immigrated to Montreal. Here, Rashid soon neglected to take financial responsibility for Nathalie or for Pythia, their daughter. Nathalie, out of desperation, took custody of Pythia and left to live with relatives in the Jewish community, freeing Rashid to became a professor of literature and ultimately a successful writer.
As we meet Rashid, he is attending a bookfair in the United Arab Emirates, where he encounters a prince who wishes to engage Rashid in an intellectual correspondence. The prince becomes a patron of the author, paying Rashid handsomely. Reluctantly (but not entirely), Rashid accepts these generous gifts, which serve to fuel his growing drug and gambling habits.
At the heart of this rich novel is the evolving relationship between Rashid and his now-grown daughter, who seeks answers about her heritage from her father. Rashid considers himself a free thinker with profoundly intellectual leftist affiliations. He proudly lives a contradictory and contrarian political and philosophical existence. But in middle-age, fuelled by increasingly out-of-control addictions, his life of constant adjustment, non-belonging, and non-conformity leads to a personal identity crisis. This prompts Rashid, out of love and fear, to seek to simplify his daughter’s life: ‘Let her be a full Jew, rather than a fraction of everything,’ he declares. This backfires spectacularly, and Pythia becomes only more curious about Rashid’s past and her own history. The relationship between an atheist father unable to live up to his obligations and a daughter searching for truth becomes the beating heart of this stunning, complex novel about the delicate, threatened, and often dangerous zone between identities.
Genre: Literary Fiction